Denny Zeitlin Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Denny Zeitlin (born April 10, 1938, Chicago, Illinois) is a jazz pianist and clinical professor of psychiatry at UC San Francisco. He composed the score for Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978). It is the only film score he has ever written.

Kaufman hired Zeitlin because he remembered hearing him play in Chicago clubs

Zeitlin has recorded as a jazz pianist since 1963 and has taught psychiatry at UCSF since 1968 — two careers he has sustained in parallel for over sixty years. Philip Kaufman (in Body Snatchers, as director) didn't find Zeitlin through the usual film-music channels — he called him because he'd grown up listening to him:

"He had grown up in Chicago and remembered hearing him play in clubs in the early 1960s and listening to his recordings, and he had always wanted to work with him on a movie score." — JazzWax summarizing Kaufman's approach to Zeitlin (2009)

Kaufman originally wanted a jazz score, but as the film took shape, his concept morphed into twentieth-century classical music with electronics and a thread of jazz. (wikipedia, imdb)

Zeitlin combined a Prophet-5 synthesizer with symphonic brass and strings

Zeitlin scored the film for orchestra plus the Sequential Circuits Prophet-5 — then newly released, the first fully programmable polyphonic synthesizer with digital patch memory. The film's sound world alternates between acoustic jazz textures, full orchestral stabs, and the Prophet's cold electronic pads. Kaufman was specific about what he did not want from the electronics:

"He also was very serious about not wanting the electronics to sound real electronic and machine-like. He wanted organic sounds, because after all, this was an invasion of an organic life form." — Denny Zeitlin, 13 Chills (2012)

Kaufman also asked Zeitlin to blur the line between score and sound effect:

"One of the interesting challenges this film had was, in Phil's idea, that at times, music needed to morph into sound effects [and] needed to morph back into music." — Denny Zeitlin, 13 Chills (2012)

That morphing is most audible in the pod-growth scenes and in the final scream. See The Pod Scream.

Zeitlin described the collaborative process as a kind of forensic listening — figuring out what Kaufman heard in his head without Kaufman having the musical language to describe it:

"I figured that if I asked the right questions, I'd hopefully be able to come up with music he'd approve." — Denny Zeitlin, JazzWax (2009)

Brian Eggert, in his definitive essay on the film, described the result as unlike anything else in film scoring:

"A weird, uncanny quality to his only film score, at times using dissonant sounds and at others, a breath-like tempo." — Brian Eggert, Deep Focus Review (2018)

The film uses two pieces of source music against Zeitlin's score

The film contains only two non-score cues. The first is "De La Tromba Pavin," a lute piece written by Richard Allison and performed by the Julian Bream Consort, which plays at Kibner's book party. The second — and far more striking — arrives near the end, when speakers on a docked cargo ship blast "Amazing Grace" performed by the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards on bagpipes. The hymn plays under the image of pods being loaded for shipment out of San Francisco. The music cuts to static, then a pod person's flat voice dispatching instructions. It is the film's sharpest juxtaposition of human feeling against the mechanism replacing it. Zeitlin's original cues return immediately after. (IMDb soundtrack listing; WhatSong soundtrack listing; Midnight Only review)

Zeitlin worked four weeks of twenty-hour days and never scored another film

The Body Snatchers job nearly broke Zeitlin. He was scoring the picture, maintaining his psychiatric practice, and playing his regular jazz dates. The schedule he kept for the duration of the post-production is the reason he has turned down every subsequent film offer.

"The experience had been exhilarating but exhausting and had ripped me away from everything else that had been dear to me. I said to myself, 'I'm never going to do that again.'" — Denny Zeitlin, quoted in Intrada liner notes, paraphrased in Wikipedia

Pauline Kael, who otherwise disliked parts of the film, singled out the score as one of its strongest elements — "generally dazzling," in her phrase, even when she felt it pushed too hard over the action. See Critical Reception and Legacy (Invasion of the Body Snatchers). (wikipedia)

Jerry Garcia plays banjo on the soundtrack, and a second source cue runs under an early scene

The film's non-score music includes a banjo performance by Jerry Garcia, heard on the soundtrack during the early San Francisco scenes. A second source-music cue, "De La Tromba Pavin" — a Renaissance dance piece written by Richard Allison and performed by the Julian Bream Consort — also appears in the film, courtesy of RCA Records. (tvtropes, imdb)

Zeitlin returned to acoustic jazz and kept the Prophet-5 out of his later records

After the film, Zeitlin went back to the trio format and to solo piano work. The Prophet-5 experiment of Body Snatchers did not feed into his subsequent records the way a typical film composer's electronic vocabulary might. The score stands alone in his discography — one long detour in a fifty-year jazz career.

Zeitlin's discography adjacent to Body Snatchers

Year	Album / Project	Notes
1964	Cathexis	Debut trio album, Columbia
1965	Carnival	Trio, with Charlie Haden
1977	Soundings	Solo electronic/acoustic record
1978	Invasion of the Body Snatchers (score)	Only film score
1980	Tidal Wave	Back to acoustic trio
2009	Precipice: Solo Piano Live at the Maybeck	Solo piano
2018	Wishing on the Moon	Trio, recorded live